All posts tagged health-care reform

Mitt Romney recently used the New Republic writer Noam Scheiber’s book on the internal struggles in the Obama administration over fiscal policy and health care—”The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery”—as a club to bludgeon President Obama:

“In this book, they point out that they said the American people will forget how long the recovery took,” Romney said. “So that means they went into this knowing that when they passed Obamacare, it was going to make life harder for the American people.”

Didn’t he realize Scheiber, a liberal, might pipe up to object? However, as it turns out, Scheiber does not dismiss Romney’s interpretation quite as thoroughly as, for example, New York magazine writer (and New Republic alumnus) Jonathan Chait, who writes, “Romney’s account is wildly wrong” and quotes comments from the economist and White House official Larry Summers concurring with that view. Here’s what Scheiber says:

Aaron Carroll, at The Incidental Economist, is fired up about a new article in the Archives of Internal Medicine [subscribers only] that purports to demonstrate how drug companies maintain their dominance in certain markets, even when generic drugs become available.

The standard dance, as documented in the article, goes like this: Company A (Abbott Labs, here) has the exclusive right to a profitable drug (fenofibrate, or Tricor-1, which fights cholesterol). Company B asserts the right to make a generic version, and Company A pushes back legally. As the litigation grinds on, Company A comes up with a slightly modified version of the original drug — perhaps changing the dosage, perhaps making a capsule into a tablet — one that’s no more effective than the original and which it now, again, has exclusive rights to. By the time the generic comes out, everyone has switched to the new drug (Tricor-2, in this case), so there’s little demand for the cheaper drug. And when someone wants to make a generic Tricor-2? Yes, you repeat the process….

That’s the first topic up for debate on SCOTUSblog’s new Community feature, which appears to be a juiced-up comments section with all-star guests from the legal world. “We ask what the Justices ‘should’ — as opposed to ‘will’ — do to encourage you to discuss the issues related to the cases not in terms of predicting the outcome, but of first principles,” writes Tom Goldstein, a Washington-based appellate lawyer who oversees the blog. “You’ll see that we have a thread on what the outcome will be; we just don’t want that to be the focus.”

Participants span the political spectrum. Erwin Chermerinsky, the left-leaning founding dean of the University of California, Irvine, law school, writes: “The Court should uphold the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act. Fifty million Americans lack health care and there is a huge cost to this in terms of needless deaths and unnecessary suffering. Those without insurance impose an enormous economic cost on the system. This is a national problem and the national government should have the power to deal with this. Under current constitutional law, the individual mandate is clearly constitutional.”…

Two researchers have found that “apology laws,” intended to reduce medical-malpractice lawsuits, are largely working as intended. In 1986, Massachusetts became the first state to forbid the use of a doctor’s apology as evidence of wrongdoing, with the goal of ending a vicious circle: Doctors fear that saying sorry exposes them to liability, but litigants often cite anger over doctors’ lack of remorse as a reason for suing. As of 2009, 36 states had these laws.

The researchers examined 225,000 malpractice payments from 1991 through 2009, comparing states with and without such laws and exploring trends within states. Cases involving the most severe injuries settled about 20% faster in states with apology laws, they found …

Biographies

Gary Rosen is the editor of Review and the former managing editor of Commentary magazine. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He is the author of "American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding" and the editor of "The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq."